What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world.
That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and
voted up or down.

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted
to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning,
there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

This example summarize size of all pdf files in /tmp directory and its subdirectories (in bytes).

Replace "/tmp" with directory path of your choice and "\*pdf" or even "-iname \*pdf" with your own pattern to match specific type of files. You can replace also parameter for du to count kilo or megabytes, but because of du rounding the sum will not be correct (especially with lot of small files and megabytes counting).

In some cases you could probably use sth like this:

du -cb `find /tmp -type f -iname \*pdf`|tail -n 1

But be aware that this second command CANNOT count files with spaces in their names and it will cheat you, if there are some files matching the pattern that you don't have rights to read. The first oneliner is resistant to such problems (it will not count sizes of files which you cant read but will give you correct sum of rest of them).

The ssh command alone will execute the sudo command remotely, but the password will be visible in the terminal as you type it. The two stty commands disable the terminal from echoing the password back to you, which makes the remote sudo act as it does locally.

Useful for cron jobs -- all output will be logged but only errors will cause email to be sent. NB the order of "2>&1" and ">> logfile" is important, it doesn't work if you reverse them (everything goes to the logfile, nothing left for tee).

The -R flag prevents you from making changes to a file, useful when you only want to view the file. This command is nicer than the 'more' or 'less' commands because for source codes, vi shows syntax highlight.

Waiting for your server to finish rebooting? Issue the command above and you will hear a beep when it comes online. The -i 60 flag tells ping to wait for 60 seconds between ping, putting less strain on your system. Vary it to your need. The -a flag tells ping to include an audible bell in the output when a package is received (that is, when your server comes online).

On Linux and Mac systems (I have not tested with other Unix systems), the ping command will keep on pinging until the user interrupts it with Ctrl+C. On Windows system, ping will execute for a number of times then quit. The -c flag on Linux and Mac will make this happen

Unreachable_host is unavailable from local network, but it's available from reachable_host's network. This command creates a connection to unreachable_host through "hidden" connection to reachable_host.